Another terror attack in London; this one seems to have ended quickly. A number of people have been stabbed.

“Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez’: Former Pro Football Player Claims the NFL ‘Is in the Violence Business’ in Netflix Documentary”

… for teaching staff.

… Egypt’s High Administrative Court turned down … appeals against the ban in an irreversible verdict…

The swaddled masses yearning to breathe free are getting lots of good news from around the world lately – burqa and niqab bans proliferate left and right, particularly in the Muslim world. But there’s always a new story from Europe too, as in a Norwegian municipality where no public employee may sport full swaddling. (Norway already has a well-established ban on burqas and niqabs in academic settings.) The debasement and absurdity of total veiling in a world of human interaction is proving increasingly unignorable almost everywhere. No doubt all them adorable ISIS pix helped rivet attention to the garment.

… Los Angeles.

Ah, UD‘s beloved Malcolm Lowry gets a mention in the big ol’ dustup about American Dirt. Here are her Lowry posts.

Dershowitz’s l’etat, c’est moi argument in front of the nation has sent the country’s defense apparatus into a spin. The Pentagon’s first act: Banning him from the well of the Senate and letting the tabloids take over as his sudden flight to Miami (“the Harvard professor surfaced in Florida”) becomes a diverting sideshow. Operation Send Out the Clown smuggles the 81-year-old to the retirement capital of the world and keeps him there under supervision, allowing him out for media appearances so demented as to make the president look normal. Long-range goal: With Thomas Markle as their model, intelligence strategists will allow Alan Dershowitz’s gibbering self-regard to reduce him to an innocuous joke.

Look, I only started writing about the guy because of his outsize enthusiasm for infant genital cutting; I had no idea he’d become… this. America’s most ridiculed, most reviled, person… America’s Meursault…

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Only the famous last lines of The Stranger can capture what Dersh has in the last years of his life achieved…

But UD will admit that (to quote one of her heroes) she’s now out of her element when it comes to this man. He’s simply too nuts.

Appraisals of the late philosopher Roger Scruton keep appearing. Some people dismiss him as a reactionary; others, like Robert George, see things differently.

you ask. Sure you ask! You might well ask! And here’s just the start of an answer – for centuries cats have been understood to be the devil himself.

What do cats do?

Cats lick wires.

Yes, they lick wires. They … lick… wires…

Take the letters of LICKWIRES and turn them around a little bit and what do you get. WHAT DO YOU GET. The same letters that make LICKWIRES make…

RICK WILES. Rick Wiles, Satan in Disguise, Satan jumbling up his name to confuse us so we listen to him purr and let him pounce.

Not enough for you? Still skeptical? How about the WILES of the devil?

LOL

***************

Sometimes it even looks as though the whole gig is up. Thank God for our very dumbest states.

Farewell mein Lieber herr
Goodbye mein Lieber herr
It was a fine affair but now it's over
And though we made you Chair
You're not allowed to share
We're better off without you mein herr

Your talent was a Thousand Talents wide mein herr
Your chemistry with China mesmerized mein herr
It's really no surprise to find you lied mein herr
But that's why
FBI
Watched you spy...

Campaign song:

Make the world go away
Get it off of my shoulders
Bolton, Kelly, what the hey?
Just make the world go away.
Do you remember when you served me
Before your conscience won the day?
Well if you do, then show some pity
And make the world go away. Make the world go away
Get it off of my shoulders
Say the things you used to say
And make the world go away.

And with that, Ireland’s justice system sentenced two do-it-yourself infant genital mutilators to several years in prison.

They practically bled their one-year-old to death until they thought better of it and took her to the hospital, where they lied and lied about just how her clitoris and chunks of her vagina had fallen bloodily off.

UD‘s heart goes out to the defense lawyer who had to argue for clemency because after mortally injuring their baby her clients compassionately checked her into an emergency room.

[The Trump Hotel in Washington DC] has still struggled to fill its rooms. In November, the Washington Post reported that the Trump International had only filled roughly half of its rooms throughout the year and lagged behind competing hotels in its occupancy rate…

It has been put up for sale.

**********

Wow. That was quick. New name: Bernie Bros’ Vegan Takeout.

From a portrait of attorney Hanno Berger, one of the masterminds of the $60 billion cum-ex heist, by someone who worked at his firm:

Sensitive types, Dr. Berger told his underlings [one] day, should find other jobs.

“Whoever has a problem with the fact that because of our work there are fewer kindergartens being built,” Dr. Berger reportedly said, “here’s the door.”

**************

A description of the world of cum-ex, German branch:

It was a realm beyond morality, [an insider] said: all male, supremely arrogant, and guided by the conviction that the German state is an enemy and German taxpayers are suckers.

*****************

And wouldn’t you just know it’d be a fuckin fraulein that fucked it all up!

But in 2011, a clerk in the Bonn Federal Central Tax Office, who was interviewed by the German media team and has remained anonymous, came across tax refund applications that looked dubious. They were from a single American pension fund that had bought, then quickly sold, $7 billion in German stock. Now it wanted a tax refund of $60 million. The fund had just one beneficiary.

Instead of paying the refund, the clerk made inquiries. She soon received a peppery letter from a German law firm that threatened to hold her “PERSONALLY” accountable “under criminal, disciplinary and liability law.” The clerk reported all of this to prosecutors, which ultimately led to the trial in Bonn.